OpenRouter brings the hub & spoke model to LLMs

Stymied by not being able to run Llama 4 on my desktop’s 24GB of VRAM, I signed up for OpenRouter. OpenRouter serves as a marketplace where providers can sell LLM generated tokens to folk like us. Every popular model, closed or open, is available and the prices are low. Instead of having an account with each provider, you can get away with just the one.

Gptel supports OpenRouter out of the box. I set it up with the API key pulled from 1Password:

(use-package gptel
  :config
  (gptel-make-openai "OpenRouter"
    :host "openrouter.ai"
    :endpoint "/api/v1/chat/completions"
    :stream t
    :key (memoize (lambda () (my-1pass-get "OpenRouter API")))
    :models '(mistralai/mixtral-8x7b-instruct
              meta-llama/llama-4-maverick
              google/gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25)))

We’ll see if this solution sticks or whether OpenRouter is consumed by the super-scalers. It’s still early days for LLMs.